Explain how the issue of sweatshops gives rise to an issue that combines women's rights, immigrant rights, environmental concerns, and human rights.

A sweatshop is a negatively connoted term for any working environment considered to be unacceptably difficult or dangerous, where workers often work long hours for very low pay, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage. Child labor laws may be violated. Sweatshops may have hazardous materials and situations. Employees may be subject to employer abuse without an easy way, if any, to protect them.

The drastic increase and re-surface of sweatshops has been due to the need to increase the economy of a nation and also due to economic globalization.

Several multinational corporations have developed a tradition of moving its production and manufacturing of materials to less developed countries in order to take advantage of cheap labor and to avoid scrutiny from governments and human rights organizations. In these countries, labor unions whose aim is to protect the rights of the workers do not exist, so therefore, the workers who are subjected to harsh working environment, low wages have their human rights violated.

Sweatshops have been a major topic of human rights and women rights violation due to the fact that most of the employees are women who are mostly young and uneducated. Young women throughout the world are exposed to harsh working conditions with countless and frequent injustices because corporations, like those owned by the United States can get away with it. Also, many of these women are undocumented immigrants who are unaware of their legal rights.

Furthermore, sweatshops violate women's human rights throughout the world through the low wages being paid which is unable to meet basic standard of living, low standard and unsafe working and living conditions, long hours of overtime for which employees are not compensated, and frequent sexual harassment. In addition to that, women are often forced into enslavement.

            Also, another issue of sweatshops is the environmental concerns which have arose from their structure of operation. Several Multinationals have been noticed to cause a lot of environmental problems such as contamination of source of water supply and poisoning of the rivers from careless oil spills. These careless actions have hindered and sometimes cost the livelihood of the habitats of an entire city.